The invention relates to duplicator machines and copying machines, particularly those capable of copying or printing in whole-page, paragraphwise and sectionwise modes of operation, onto sheets of paper, cards, slips, tickets or the like.
In clerical work-preparing procedures, it is for example known to imprint upon slips of paper already bearing certain printed information further information derived from an original, or the like, by means of a duplicator machine. For example, it is known to insert a multi-line customer order page into a copying machine. The customer order page may consist of a list of items to be produced for a customer order, each line specifying the type of item and the number of such items to be produced for the customer, and other such information. The copying machine then makes a plurality of copies of such customer order. The copies may be of the entire customer order page, or instead successive lines of the customer order may be copied onto successive copies. These copies are then used for various purposes. The copies may be sent to different factory sections respectively charged with the manufacture of the types of items on the successive copies. Alternatively, if the plurality of copies made from an original are all identical, they may be sent to different clerical departments, such as the billing department, the inventory department, the personnel supervision department, the cost accounting department, etc.
Various ways are known for expeditiously routing such copies. For example, the sheets of papers, cards, or the like, which are fed into the copying machine may from the start bear printed information such as "for the billing department", "for the inventory department", "for the personnel supervision department", etc. Alternatively, the sheets of papers, cards, or the like which are fed into the copying machine may be entirely blank but be of different colors, so that the billing department receives the yellow copies, the inventory department the blue copies, and so forth.
Such a breakdown of copies is an outgrowth, in part, of the previous use in industry of mainfold carbon-paper packets containing a set of preprinted blank forms on differently colored sheets, with the first sheet being filled in with handwriting or by typewriter, the packet disassembled, and the differently colored copies then properly routed. Often, with such carbon-paper packets, certain ones of the differently colored copies had blacked-out portions so arranged that some of the information entered onto the top sheet of the packet would not become entered onto some or all of the differently colored copies.
A problem with such carbon-paper packets is that often the number of differently colored copies required exceeded the number of copies which could be produced using multiple layers of carbon paper, so that the last copies in the packet would be very faint or altogether illegible. Accordingly, more and more, interest is turning to the aforedescribed use of duplicators and copying machines for making the requisite copies.
However, a serious problem exists when the copies are made using duplicator machines. If the different copies are to be made on differently colored and/or differently pre-printed forms, then it is necessary to feed the differently colored, or otherwise differing forms into the duplicator machine in the proper sequence. Likewise, a sufficient supply of the differently colored, or otherwise differing sheets must be kept on hand at all times. It is in particular the feeding of the differently colored, or otherwise differing forms into the machine which presents the greatest problem.
It is known to employ a plurality of cooperating sheet-feeding units, operating one after the other in cyclical fashion for feeding into the duplicator machine sheets of different successive colors, for example.
However, the need for a plurality of cooperating and coordinated sheet-feeding units, and the necessity for keeping separate supplies of the differently colored, or otherwise differing sheets, slips, tickets, cards, or the like, is inconvenient and costly. Moreover, with the known sequencing techniques, if there is a misfeed or nonfeed of a sheet of one color, or one characteristic, there may be a loss of coordination in the color code sequence which may persist undetected for a time long enough to cause considerable clerical confusion thereafter.